Conservative elites pine for 2012 hero

From The Weekly Standard to The Wall Street Journal, on the pages of policy periodicals and opinion sections, the egghead right’s longing for a presidential candidate of ideas — first Mitch Daniels, then Paul Ryan — has been endless, intense and unrequited.

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Profoundly dissatisfied with the current field, that dull ache may only grow more acute after Ryan’s decision Monday to take himself out of the running.

The problem, in shorthand: To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke and Mitt Romney is a fraud.

They don’t publicly express their judgments in such harsh terms, but the low regard is obvious: The Journal’s editorial board, the bible of conservative intellectual orthodoxy, pretty much excommunicated Romney from the movement in May for his health care sins. Then, last week, the editorial board suggested that Bachmann and Perry couldn’t be elected, and that “now would be the time” for “someone still off the field to step up.”

The editorial spoke, as it said, for “desperate” voters — but the board could have been talking about itself.

From the Journal’s Midtown Manhattan conference room to the fluorescent corridors of Washington’s think tanks, there is a collective sense of, is this the best we can do?

“It just does seem to be a little crazy in a year when you have a chance to win the presidency that a lot of leading lights aren’t putting themselves forward,” said William Kristol, Weekly Standard editor and indefatigable Ryan advocate, who hopefully brandished a Ryan-Rubio button on Fox News Sunday.

But when Ryan reaffirmed that he won’t seek the GOP nomination, the conservative intelligentsia’s last best hope to get one of their own in the race appeared to have vanished.

The 41-year-old House Budget Committee chairman wasn’t just the right’s beau ideal because he authored the Roadmap for America’s Future, the controversial entitlement and spending reform plan — it’s also because his political roots are in the think tank world. Ryan worked for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at Empower America as a 20-something, and even now, he’s closer to conservative thinkers than he is to the typical GOP lobbyists and strategists that surround ambitious pols.

“They made Paul Ryan into a heartthrob,” said National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru of his fellow right-leaning thinkers.

And he seemed a man for a wonky moment.

“In some ways, [the current field is] less satisfying because this is a particularly policy-heavy moment and the most wonky of the wonky issues are front and center,” said Yuval Levin, the Hertog Fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “We feel the absence of policy intellectuals more.”

Ryan wasn’t the first intellectual crush, though.

For much of this year, Daniels was the It boy among Republican thinkers. His gold-plated résumé, Hudson Institute pedigree, budget-cutting record in Indianapolis and sober exhortations to confront “the new red menace” of federal spending made the hearts of conservative intellectuals flutter and launched dozens of columns and magazine covers.

“All this comes back to the failure of Mitch Daniels to get into the race — he was the guy who had the potential to unite the conservative intelligentsia and the quirky, eclectic types like me,” said New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the co-author of the manifesto that aimed to launch a populist Sam’s Club conservatism.

Intellectuals “felt he didn’t pander — they felt he had a substantively impressive record in Indiana,” said his co-author Reihan Salam, who writes a domestic policy blog for National Review, and who began calling for a Daniels candidacy back in 2008. “There was something about his political style that was very anti-political, and that people found impressive.”

When Daniels turned his back on the draft movement, Tim Pawlenty sought to move into the Hoosier’s wonky space.